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Florida plans to become the first state in the country to eliminate all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, announced on Wednesday. The Florida Department of Health, in partnership with the governor, is going to be working to end all vaccine mandates in Florida lawall of them. All of them. Every last one of them, Ladapo said during a news conference alongside Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The state’s surgeon general added that Florida has maybe half a dozen shots mandated currently. The mandates, which have been in effect for decades, have been a bedrock of the United States’ public health policy aimed at curbing the spread of disease nationwide, The Associated Press noted. Both physician and public health groups have promoted the safety and efficacy of vaccines, especially among schoolchildren. People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions, Ladapo, a vaccine critic, said. The rollback could lead to fewer children getting immunized against diseases like polio and measles. The Trump administration’s changing policies on vaccines under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have brought on more debate about whether parents should opt out of the shots as the school year begins. In Florida, the number of kindergartners with nonmedical vaccine exemptions rose this year, as it has nationwide, coinciding with the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. News that Florida would be ending its vaccine policy drew a strong reaction in some corners of social media, with some people saying they would not be visiting Florida as a result. “After 35 years of many trips to Florida, this is the last straw,” Figgy wrote in the comments section of The New York Times. “We’re selling off our property rather than be subjected to all the disease-infected residents that have elected these political hacks that don’t give a fig about their own people, let alone the tourism industry that supports their state.” In related news, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now questioning whether it’s safe to get multiple respiratory vaccines at oncefor example, the flu, coronavirus, and other RSV shotssignaling a possible reversal of long-standing federal guidance, The Washington Post reported. Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine official, said the agency is now unsure about the safety of that practice.
Category:
E-Commerce
Employees at tech giant Oracle are facing down a fresh round of layoffs this month, the latest bad news out of an industry thats either booming or brutal, depending on whom you ask. The company has yet to publicly confirm the new cuts to its workforce, but state data shows that Oracle is reducing its Seattle-area workforce by 101 employees. The layoffs were filed with Washington state on September 2 and will go into effect by November 3. While state filings only reflect Seattle area jobs lost for now, Oracle employees in other states shared news of their jobs being cut on LinkedIn. In some instances, newly laid-off employees worked for the company for 20 years, so the round of reductions may not solely have impacted more recent hires. Oracle workers based in Kansas, Massachusetts, and Texas were among those who said their positions were eliminated as part of a workforce reduction. On anonymous message boards, some Oracle employees reported seeing the companys general Slack channel drop by around 3,500 members in the last 24 hours, but no official numbers have yet confirmed the scope of the latest round of layoffs. Some states make layoff data public through a kind of law known as a mini-WARN Act, which stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. The laws are designed to provide workers with advance notice of mass layoffs and often collect that information into state databases. California also operates a WARN database, but it did not include new Oracle layoffs at the time of writing. Fast Company reached out to Oracle to confirm the layoffs but has not received a response from the company. Multiple rounds of layoffs Oracle also cut jobs last month. In mid-August, the company notified the state that it planned to eliminate 289 positions in the Bay Area across its offices in Pleasanton, Redwood City, and Santa Clara. In the same flurry of layoffs, Oracle planned to reduce its workforce by 161 positions in the Seattle area, where the company employs around 4,000 workers. The company has been conspicuously reducing its office footprint in Seattle over the last year. Oracles employees are facing uncertainty as their employer trims its massive workforce, but the company itself is having a banner year. The enterprise hardware and software provider notched its best week since 2001 over the summer, with shares peaking at a record high above $250 last month. In its June earnings call, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison marveled at spiking demand for the companys products. Even as it pours billions into cloud and AI infrastructure, Oracle is apparently still scrambling to keep pace with its happy customers. The demand is astronomical, Ellison said. But we have to do this methodically. The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is that we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s administration is reconsidering federal approval of Avangrid’s planned New England Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, according to a court filing on Wednesday. The legal maneuver is the latest move by U.S. authorities to stymie development of offshore wind energy, which Trump has called ugly, expensive, and unreliable. Last week, the administration also said it was reconsidering approval of SouthCoast Wind, another planned Massachusetts project. Attorneys for the Department of Justice said they would move by October 10 to vacate the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval of the New England Wind construction and operations plan. The filing came in a lawsuit brought earlier this year in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by local groups and individuals opposed to offshore wind development. The suit alleges the government violated federal environmental laws by approving the project. Avangrid, which is owned by Spanish power company Iberdrola, declined to comment. New England Wind was approved by former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. The project, once built, was expected to be able to produce enough electricity to power 900,000 homes. Representatives for ACK for Whales, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, could not immediately be reached for comment. By Nichola Groom and Laila Kearney, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
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